J.A. Bayona is the kind of director who realizes that, on its own, being caught in a dinosaur stampede is pretty boring - so he adds torrents of gushing magma. “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” picks up a couple years after “Jurassic World” left off and, as you’ll recall at the end of the 2015 film, all the dinosaurs from the theme park were left to their own devices on Isla Nublar.
The bummer is that a volcano is ready to blow on the island, so the un-extinct will become re-extinct - the lava-engulfed brachiosaurus will suffer the same fate as the skinny polar bear on an ice floe.
As far as Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is concerned, dinos are endangered species that deserve special protection, so she leads a Greenpeace-y nonprofit called the Dinosaur Protection Group.
Luckily her boring nephews from the 2015 disaster have vanished, but now she has the nearest equivalent to small children - millennial interns - to look after. There’s tech guy Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) and Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda), who is some kind of dinosaur healer - one wonders which university trained her to do interspecies reptile blood transfusions?
Claire is pitched by rich dudes Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) and Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) to rescue the threatened dinosaurs from Isla Nublar and deliver them to a new island, called Sanctuary, as “a gift for our children.” Mills and Lockwood are especially keen to save Blue (the CGI velociraptor the script goes to extraordinary lengths to make us invest in emotionally). To do so, Claire must recruit her ex-hunk and raptor whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt).
She finds him in the woods building a cabin and still smarting because Claire didn’t want to live in a van with him. After listening to her stilted pitch, Owen shows up for the flight to Isla Nublar because, doggone it, he loves that velociraptor (or maybe he couldn’t decide on a potbelly stove to complete his shanty).
The lazy script of “Fallen World” is revealed by its queasy one-liners. Upon arrival for the rescue mission, Owen remarks, “It’s about to get a whole lot hotter” while squinting at an erupting volcano. About him are heart-rending images of the destroyed park-desiccated piles of baryonyx bones and a Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville in ruins.
Their guide is Ken Wheatley (Ted Levine), a dino hunter with a bandolier of tranquilizer bullets. Our suspicions that he is not a good person are proven correct when he refers to Zia as a “nasty woman.” It turns out he has no plans to deliver the dinosaurs to Sanctuary - he is sending them to cages on a container ship, like a less altruistic Noah.
After Howard’s character Claire received blowback for running from pterodactyls in high heels in the execrable “Jurassic World,” a point is made to show the sensible boots and olive drab she wears this time around. When the good guys fight against Wheatley by stowing away on the dinosaur-laden ship, Claire puts on a John Deere hat - a brilliant disguise and further proof she’s not too girly anymore!
Noah would have been surprised to arrive at the mountains of Ararat and find the contents of his Ark were being sold to international arms dealers but it doesn’t faze Wheatley. The auction is run by Eversol (Toby Jones), who accepts the bids of warlords ready to weaponize dinosaurs for combat. Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) re-emerges from the cabinet of racial stereotypes to shill his latest designer dino, the Indoraptor, which can kill specific targets on command.
The film goes on from there with lots of screaming and sharp teeth, but the endgame is predictable: the only way to stop a bad genetically-modified un-extinct dinosaur is with a good genetically-modified un-extinct dinosaur.
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